We now turn to the goal of this series namely to establish the fact that the general polynomial of degree $5$ or higher is not solvable by radicals over its field of coefficients. Here Abel's argument is quite terse and I have not been able to fully comprehend some parts of it. Also proof of some statements are not provided by Abel because it appeared quite obvious to him. We will provide here a proof which is based on Ruffini's arguments and its later simplification by Wantzel.
Abel and the Insolvability of the Quintic: Part 3
The proof for the non-solvability of polynomial equation of degree $5$ (or more) by radicals obviously has to proceed via method of contradiction. Abel therefore assumed that such a solution was possible for a quintic and then figured out the most general form of such a solution. At the same time Abel observed that the radical expressions occurring in such a form must themselves be rational expressions of the roots desired. This was a key part which Abel proved for the first time. This result was later termed as the Theorem of Natural Irrationalities.
By
Paramanand Singh
Friday, January 3, 2014
Abel and the Insolvability of the Quintic: Part 2
In the last post we defined the concept of a radical field extension along the lines of the definition of algebraic functions given by Abel. In the current post we will study some properties of such field extensions which will ultimately enable us to study the field extension $\mathbb{C}(x_{1}, x_{2}, \ldots, x_{n})$ of $\mathbb{C}(s_{1}, s_{2}, \ldots, s_{n})$ where $s_{1}, s_{2}, \ldots, s_{n}$ are elementary symmetric functions of the indeterminates $x_{1}, x_{2}, \ldots, x_{n}$.
By
Paramanand Singh
Thursday, January 2, 2014
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